The Best of Nancy Kress

by Nancy Kress

  “Let’s just do it!” She yanked all the clothes from Camden’s closet, piled them on the floor, scrawled FOR VOLUNTEER AGENCY on a piece of paper, and dropped it on top of the pile. Silently, Alice started adding clothes from the dresser, which already bore a taped paper bearing the words, ESTATE AUCTION.

  The curtains were already down throughout the house; Alice had done that yesterday. She had also rolled up the rugs. Sunset glared red on the bare wooden floors.

  “What about your old room?” Leisha said. “What do you want there?”

  “I’ve already tagged it,” Alice said. “A mover will come Thursday.”

  “Fine. What else?”

  “The conservatory. Sanderson has been watering everything, but he didn’t really know what needed how much, so some of the plants are—”

  “Fire Sanderson,” Leisha said curtly. “The exotics can die. Or have them sent to a hospital, if you’d rather. Just watch out for the ones that are poisonous. Come on, let’s do the library.”

  Alice sat slowly on a rolled-up rug in the middle of Camden’s bedroom. She had cut her hair; Leisha thought it looked ugly, like jagged brown spikes around her broad face. She had also gained more weight. She was starting to look like their mother.

  Alice said, “Do you remember the night I told you I was pregnant? Just before you left for Harvard?”

  “Let’s do the library!”

  “Do you?” Alice said. “For God’s sake, can’t you just once listen to someone else, Leisha? Do you have to be so much like Daddy every single minute?”

  “I’m not Daddy!”

  “The hell you’re not. You’re exactly what he made you. But that’s not the point. Do you remember that night?”

  Leisha walked over the rug and out the door. Alice simply sat. After a minute Leisha walked back in. “I remember.”

  “You were near tears,” Alice said implacably. Her voice was quiet. “I don’t even remember exactly why. Maybe because I wasn’t going to college after all. But I put my arms around you, and for the first time in years—years, Leisha—I felt you really were my sister. Despite all of it—the roaming the halls all night and the showoff arguments with Daddy and the special school and the artificially long legs and golden hair—all that crap. You seemed to need me to hold you. You seemed to need me. You seemed to need.”

  “What are you saying?” Leisha demanded. “That you can only be close to someone if they’re in trouble and need you? That you can only be a sister if I was in some kind of pain, open sores running? Is that the bond between you Sleepers? ‘Protect me while I’m unconscious, I’m just as crippled as you are’?”

  “No,” Alice said. “I’m saying that you could be a sister only if you were in some kind of pain.”

  Leisha stared at her. “You’re stupid, Alice.”

  Alice said calmly, “I know that. Compared to you, I am. I know that.”

  Leisha jerked her head angrily. She felt ashamed of what she had just said, and yet it was true, and they both knew it was true, and anger still lay in her like a dark void, formless and hot. It was the formless part that was the worst. Without shape, there could be no action; without action, the anger went on burning her, choking her.

  Alice said, “When I was twelve Susan gave me a dress for our birthday. You were away somewhere, on one of those overnight field trips your fancy progressive school did all the time. The dress was silk, pale blue, with antique lace—very beautiful. I was thrilled, not only because it was beautiful but because Susan had gotten it for me and gotten software for you. The dress was mine. Was, I thought, me.” In the gathering gloom Leisha could barely make out her broad, plain features. “The first time I wore it a boy said, ‘Stole your sister’s dress, Alice? Snitched it while she was sleeping?’ Then he laughed like crazy, the way they always did.

  “I threw the dress away. I didn’t even explain to Susan, although I think she would have understood. Whatever was yours was yours, and whatever wasn’t yours was yours, too. That’s the way Daddy set it up. The way he hard-wired it into our genes.”

  “You, too?” Leisha said. “You’re no different from the other envious beggars?”

  Alice stood up from the rug. She did it slowly, leisurely, brushing dust off the back of her wrinkled skirt, smoothing the print fabric. Then she walked over and hit Leisha in the mouth.

  “Now do you see me as real?” Alice asked quietly.

  Leisha put her hand to her mouth. She felt blood. The phone rang, Camden’s unlisted personal line. Alice walked over, picked it up, listened, and held it calmly out to Leisha. “It’s for you.”

  Numb, Leisha took it.

  “Leisha? This is Kevin. Listen, something’s happened. Stella Bevington called me, on the phone, not Groupnet; I think her parents took away her modem. I picked up the phone and she screamed, ‘This is Stella! They’re hitting me, he’s drunk—’ and then the line went dead. Randy’s gone to Sanctuary—hell, they’ve all gone. You’re closest to her, she’s still in Skokie. You better get there fast. Have you got bodyguards you trust?”

  “Yes,” Leisha said, although she hadn’t. The anger, finally, took form. “I can handle it.”

  “I don’t know how you’ll get her out of there,” Kevin said. “They’ll recognize you, they know she called somebody, they might even have knocked her out….”

  “I’ll handle it,” Leisha said.

  “Handle what?” Alice said.

  Leisha faced her. Even though she knew she shouldn’t, she said, “What your people do. To one of ours. A seven-year-old kid who’s getting beaten by her parents because she’s Sleepless—because she’s better than you are—” She ran down the stairs and out to the rental car she had driven from the airport.

  Alice ran right down with her. “Not your car, Leisha. They can trace a rental car just like that. My car.”

  Leisha screamed, “If you think you’re—”

  Alice yanked open the door of her battered Toyota, a model so old the Y-energy cones weren’t even concealed but hung like drooping jowls on either side. She shoved Leisha into the passenger seat, slammed the door, and rammed herself behind the wheel. Her hands were steady. “Where?”

  Blackness swooped over Leisha. She put her head down, as far between her knees as the cramped Toyota would allow. It had been two—no, three—days since she had eaten. Not since the night before the bar exams. The faintness receded, swept over her again as soon as she raised her head.

  She told Alice the address in Skokie.

  “Stay way in the back,” Alice said. “And there’s a scarf in the glove compartment—put it on. Low, to hide as much of your face as possible.”

  Alice stopped the car along Highway 42. Leisha said, “This isn’t—”

  “It’s a quick-guard place. We have to look like we have some protection, Leisha. We don’t need to tell him anything. I’ll hurry.”

  She was out in three minutes with a huge man in a cheap dark suit. He squeezed into the front seat beside Alice and said nothing at all. Alice did not introduce him.

  The house was small, a little shabby, with lights on downstairs, none upstairs. The first stars shone in the north, away from Chicago. Alice said to the guard, “Get out of the car and stand here by the car door—no, more in the light—and don’t do anything unless I’m attacked in some way.” The man nodded. Alice started up the walk. Leisha scrambled out of the back seat and caught her sister two-thirds of the way to the plastic front door.

  “Alice, what the hell are you doing? I have to—”

  “Keep your voice down,” Alice said, glancing at the guard. “Leisha, think. You’ll be recognized. Here, near Chicago, with a Sleepless daughter—these people have looked at your picture in magazines for years. They’ve watched long-range holovids of you. They know you. They know you’re going to be a lawyer. Me they’ve never seen. I’m nobody.”

  “Alice—”

  “For Chrissake, get back in the car!” Alice hissed, and pounded on the front door.
r />   Leisha drew off the walk, into the shadow of a willow tree. A man opened the door. His face was completely blank.

  Alice said, “Child Protection Agency. We got a call from a little girl, this number. Let me in.”

  “There’s no little girl here.”

  “This is an emergency, priority one,” Alice said. “Child Protection Act 186. Let me in!”

  The man, still blank-faced, glanced at the huge figure by the car. “You got a search warrant?”

  “I don’t need one in a priority-one child emergency. If you don’t let me in, you’re going to have legal snarls like you never bargained for.”

  Leisha clamped her lips together. No one would believe that, it was legal gobbledygook…. Her lip throbbed where Alice had hit it.

  The man stood aside to let Alice enter.

  The guard started forward. Leisha hesitated, then let him. He entered with Alice.

  Leisha waited, alone, in the dark.

  In three minutes they were out, the guard carrying a child. Alice’s broad face gleamed pale in the porch light. Leisha sprang forward, opened the car door, and helped the guard ease the child inside. The guard was frowning, a slow puzzled frown shot with wariness.

  Alice said, “Here. This is an extra hundred dollars. To get back to the city by yourself.”

  “Hey…” the guard said, but he took the money. He stood looking after them as Alice pulled away.

  “He’ll go straight to the police,” Leisha said despairingly. “He has to, or risk his union membership.”

  “I know,” Alice said. “But by that time we’ll be out of the car.”

  “Where?”

  “At the hospital,” Alice said.

  “Alice, we can’t—” Leisha didn’t finish. She turned to the back seat. “Stella? Are you conscious?”

  “Yes,” said the small voice.

  Leisha groped until her fingers found the rear-seat illuminator. Stella lay stretched out on the seat, her face distorted with pain. She cradled her left arm in her right. A single bruise colored her face, above the left eye. Her red hair was tangled and dirty.

  “You’re Leisha Camden,” the child said, and started to cry.

  “Her arm’s broken,” Alice said.

  “Honey, can you…” Leisha’s throat felt thick, she had trouble getting the words out “…can you hold on till we get you to a doctor?”

  “Yes,” Stella said. “Just don’t take me back there!”

  “We won’t,” Leisha said. “Ever.” She glanced at Alice and saw Tony’s face.

  Alice said, “There’s a community hospital about ten miles south of here.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I was there once. Drug overdose,” Alice said briefly. She drove hunched over the wheel, with the face of someone thinking furiously. Leisha thought, too, trying to see a way around the legal charge of kidnapping. They probably couldn’t say the child came willingly. Stella would undoubtedly cooperate but at her age and in her condition she was probably non sui juris, her word would have no legal weight….

  “Alice, we can’t even get her into the hospital without insurance information. Verifiable online.”

  “Listen,” Alice said, not to Leisha but over her shoulder, toward the back seat, “here’s what we’re going to do, Stella. I’m going to tell them you’re my daughter and you fell off a big rock you were climbing while we stopped for a snack at a roadside picnic area. We’re driving from California to Philadelphia to see your grandmother. Your name is Jordan Watrous and you’re five years old. Got that, honey?”

  “I’m seven,” Stella said. “Almost eight.”

  “You’re a very large five. Your birthday is March 23. Can you do this, Stella?”

  “Yes,” the little girl said. Her voice was stronger.

  Leisha stared at Alice. “Can you do this?”

  “Of course I can,” Alice said. “I’m Roger Camden’s daughter.”

  Alice half-carried, half-supported Stella into the Emergency Room of the small community hospital. Leisha watched from the car: the short stocky woman, the child’s thin body with the twisted arm. Then she drove Alice’s car to the farthest corner of the parking lot, under the dubious cover of a skimpy maple, and locked it. She tied the scarf more securely around her face.

  Alice’s license plate number, and her name, would be in every police and rental-car databank by now. The medical banks were slower; often they uploaded from local precincts only once a day, resenting the governmental interference in what was still, despite a half-century of battle, a private-sector enterprise. Alice and Stella would probably be all right in the hospital. Probably. But Alice could not rent another car.

  Leisha could.

  But the data file that would flash to rental agencies on Alice Camden Watrous might or might not include that she was Leisha Camden’s twin.

  Leisha looked at the rows of cars in the lot. A flashy luxury Chrysler, an Ikeda van, a row of middle-class Toyotas and Mercedes, a vintage ’99 Cadillac—she could imagine the owner’s face if that were missing—ten or twelve cheap runabouts, a hover car with the uniformed driver asleep at the wheel. And a battered farm truck.

  Leisha walked over to the truck. A man sat at the wheel, smoking. She thought of her father.

  “Hello,” Leisha said.

  The man rolled down his window but didn’t answer. He had greasy brown hair.

  “See that hover car over there?” Leisha said. She made her voice sound young, high. The man glanced at it indifferently; from this angle you couldn’t see that the driver was asleep. “That’s my bodyguard. He thinks I’m inside, the way my father told me to, getting this lip looked at.” She could feel her mouth swollen from Alice’s blow.

  “So?”

  Leisha stamped her foot. “So I don’t want to be inside. He’s a shit and so’s Daddy. I want out. I’ll give you four thousand bank credits for your truck. Cash.”

  The man’s eyes widened. He tossed away his cigarette and looked again at the hover car. The driver’s shoulders were broad, and the car was within easy screaming distance.

  “All nice and legal,” Leisha said, trying to smirk. Her knees felt watery.

  “Let me see the cash.”

  Leisha backed away from the truck, to where he could not reach her. She took the money from her arm clip. She was used to carrying a lot of cash; there had always been Bruce, or someone like Bruce. There had always been safety.

  “Get out of the truck on the other side,” Leisha said, “and lock the door behind you. Leave the keys on the seat, where I can see them from here. Then I’ll put the money on the roof where you can see it.”

  The man laughed, a sound like gravel pouring. “Regular little Dabney Engh, aren’t you? Is that what they teach you society debs at your fancy schools?”

  Leisha had no idea who Dabney Engh was. She waited, watching the man try to think of a way to cheat her, and tried to hide her contempt. She thought of Tony.

  “All right,” he said, and slid out of the truck.

  “Lock the door!”

  He grinned, opened the door again, and locked it. Leisha put the money on the roof, yanked open the driver’s door, clambered in, locked the door, and powered up the window. The man laughed. She put the key into the ignition, started the truck, and drove toward the street. Her hands trembled.

  She drove slowly around the block twice. When she came back, the man was gone, and the driver of the hover car was still asleep. She had wondered if the man would wake him, out of sheer malice, but he had not. She parked the truck and waited.

  An hour and a half later Alice and a nurse wheeled Stella out of the Emergency entrance. Leisha leaped out of the truck and yelled, “Coming, Alice!” waving both her arms. It was too dark to see Alice’s expression; Leisha could only hope that Alice showed no dismay at the battered truck, that she had not told the nurse to expect a red car.

  Alice said, “This is Julie Bergadon, a friend that I called while you were setting Jorda
n’s arm.” The nurse nodded, uninterested. The two women helped Stella into the high truck cab; there was no back seat. Stella had a cast on her arm and looked drugged.

  “How?” Alice said as they drove off.

  Leisha didn’t answer. She was watching a police hover car land at the other end of the parking lot. Two officers got out and strode purposefully toward Alice’s locked car under the skimpy maple.

  “My God,” Alice said. For the first time, she sounded frightened.

  “They won’t trace us,” Leisha said. “Not to this truck. Count on it.”

  “Leisha.” Alice’s voice spiked with fear. “Stella’s asleep.”

  Leisha glanced at the child, slumped against Alice’s shoulder. “No, she’s not. She’s unconscious from painkillers.”

  “Is that all right? Normal? For…her?”

  “We can black out. We can even experience substance-induced sleep.” Tony and she and Richard and Jennifer in the midnight woods…. “Didn’t you know that, Alice?”

  “No.”

  “We don’t know very much about each other, do we?”

  They drove south in silence. Finally Alice said, “Where are we going to take her, Leisha?”

  “I don’t know. Any one of the Sleepless would be the first place the police would check—”

  “You can’t risk it. Not the way things are,” Alice said. She sounded weary. “But all my friends are in California. I don’t think we could drive this rust bucket that far before getting stopped.”

  “It wouldn’t make it anyway.”

  “What should we do?”

  “Let me think.”

  At an expressway exit was a pay phone. It wouldn’t be data-shielded, as Groupnet was. Would Kevin’s open line be tapped? Probably.

  There was no doubt the Sanctuary line would be.

  Sanctuary. All of them were going there or already there, Kevin had said. Holed up, trying to pull the worn Allegheny Mountains around them like a safe little den. Except for the children like Stella, who could not.

  Where? With whom?

  Leisha closed her eyes. The Sleepless were out; the police would find Stella within hours. Susan Melling? But she had been Alice’s all-too visible stepmother, and was a co-beneficiary of Camden’s will; they would question her almost immediately. It couldn’t be anyone traceable to Alice. It could only be a Sleeper that Leisha knew, and trusted, and why should anyone at all fit that description? Why should she risk so much on anyone who did?